An Agenda For Digital Journals: The Socio-Technical Infrastructure Of Knowledge Dissemination

The problems of information overload from the growth of scholarly literature, and the need to use information technology to manage them, were identified by major writers and scientists over fifty years ago. Yet the main form of scholarly communication, the journal, is still circulated in paper form as it has been for over three hundred years. The economic arguments for using computer and communication technology to overcome these problems through a new form of scientific communication, the electronic or digital journal, were vigorously presented in the 1970s. Experimental trials of digital journals with the technologies of the 1970s and 1980s have not been successful. In the 1990s, the continuing value of current journal systems is again being questioned in terms of soaring library costs, the burden of the current refereeing system and the diminishing returns of journal publication brought about by information overload. This paper presents a fundamental examination of the prerequisites..